Category Archives: American Studies

American Studies, Knowledge Transmission, Modern, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026

tsp to smbc: Culinary Vernacular and the Evolution of Language in Personal Recipes

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By KC Hysmith

Brillat-Savarin might be able to tell you about yourself based on the food you eat, but I bet I can tell you even more by how you abbreviate the word “teaspoon” when writing out a recipe. No matter how you learned to shorten it, the way you write “teaspoon” reveals ample information about your culinary influences. Looking at a larger body of work, such as someone’s personal recipe collection, provides even more details.  

Personal recipe collections contain countless semiotic clues about their authors, but they also hold linguistic tells of shared experiences and community, revealing historical, social, and economical insights about all the people and places that made each recipe possible. Through the lens of measurement abbreviations, this post considers the importance of a shared culinary vernacular and how it passes between recipe collections (from one generation to the next; from one demographic to another) in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American world, and analyzes the evolution of language, especially in regards to transcription and the shift from analog to digital.

Food scholars Amy L. Tigner and Allison Carruth argue that recipe writing serves as a kind of literary vernacular practice with “quotidian modes of writing that develop within specific historical contexts and that intermix rhetorical and aesthetic craft with the dissemination of applied knowledge that is variously empirical, sensory, instructive, interactive, and intergenerational.”[i] The deliberate use of the concept of vernacular versus “jargon,” “dialect,” or “code” highlights the particularity of recipe language and its functional design (which Tigner and Carruth align with the word’s “Latin root vernaculus, meaning domestic”).

There’s no official abbreviation, as each major publication from published cookbooks to legacy media outlets has their own preference, but common versions include: “tsp.” (with period), “tsp” (sans period), a lowercase “t,” “ts,” and “tspn”. It’s never a capital “T,” because that is typically saved for denoting tablespoons (unless you’re German or Dutch, then you’ll likely use a capital “TL” for Teelöffel or Theelepel, which translates to “teaspoon,” respectively). All of these variations came about thanks to numerous colliding forces including culinary literacy, generational trends, cooking methods, and technologies ranging from writing implements to autocorrect (and now, AI).

While personal recipes might start as strictly private, ephemeral texts, they sometimes become shared semi-public artefacts. Countless personal recipes have been shared in community and church cookbooks (often with myriad culinary vernacular stylings)). My departed mother’s recipe for pan de campo (she also uses “tsp,” but funnily does not abbreviate “cup”) sits framed on my office wall. And my personal recipe for cornbread (I use the little “t” notation, when I’m not dealing in metric), has been passed through many hands, in both written and digital forms. Even celebrity chefs with professionally published cookbooks sometimes find their personal recipes in the public eye; consider Julia Child’s handwritten recipe for pain de mie (she uses “tsp” and “c.”) which was pulled from her personal collection and is now on display at the National Museum of American History.

Sharing culinary information is part of our society’s cultural tradition, a custom that blurs the relationship between private recipe text and public artefact.

A scanned image of a page with cake recipes from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896.
Fig. 1. Recipes for cake, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Fannie Farmer, 1896, Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project.

 

The ubiquitous use of standardized measurements—using a “tsp” versus the more obscure “spoonful”—transformed the world of recipe writing. Until the early twentieth century, recipes were incredibly imprecise, according to food historian Helen Zoe Veit, owing to the lack of oven thermometers, timepieces, and “scant tools available to ordinary people to tell exactly how much of an ingredient they were adding.”[ii] Though many contributed to this shift, domestic scientist and culinary lead of the famous nineteenth-century Boston Cooking School, Fannie Farmer, is widely considered the “mother of level measurements” in the United States. Farmer’s methods—along with several other recipe writing “best practices” such as ingredient lists and ordinal instructions—were quickly adopted along with a nationwide trend towards the scientific standardization of all spaces in the age of industrialization.

But recipes are more than their measured ingredients. How we name recipes (or don’t) plays a part in this vernacular, too, with longer titles losing adjectives along the way. When we write recipes for ourselves, we often write instructions as truncated actions, generously detailed instructions, or some combination. And then there are the recipes that are mere lists of ingredient ratios that expect the reader to know how to combine them, a shift from early historical recipes that were mostly instructions with a few non-standard measurements sprinkled in (if you were lucky).

A folded over lined notebook, messy with ingredient smudges and drips, lists ingredients in metric measurements for a banana and tahini baked good.
Fig. 2. Recipe for Banana Tahini Muffins by Oona O’Toole, baker at While You’re Up Bakery in Carrboro, NC, texted to the author without instructions.
A scanned image of a manuscript page full of sprawling handwriting explaining a 17th century gingerbread recipe.
Fig. 3. A recipe for gingerbread, “A collection of medical receipts and prescriptions,” MS502, 1650, Royal College of Physicians catalogue

 

The advent and exponential use of the Internet in the aughts and 2010s created additional influences on the recipe vernacular, for as the amount of information available grew, our attention spans shrunk even as recipe titles grew longer (ex: Briny, Garlicky, Lemony Green Beans with Quick-Pickled Red Onions). The acronyms and abbreviated words of Internetspeak (LOL) were already well worn linguistic territory of recipe writing. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch argues that “Internet acronyms are a perfect example of the intersection between writing and informality.”[iii] Then came social media. At first there were character limits, 140 characters for X (formerly Twitter) and 2200 for Instagram. Early Twitter users relied on code-like workarounds—slashes, no spaces, symbols—to fit full recipes into the character container.

A screenshot of a Twitter (X) post by Maureen Evans (@cookbook) featuring a recipe for Pumpkin Pie.
Fig. 4. A screenshot of a Twitter (X) post by Maureen Evans (@cookbook) featuring a recipe for Pumpkin Pie.

 

A screenshot of the results of a query in the Instagram app for the hashtag #smbc. Results include nine preview square images of various cakes, upclose frosting shots, and a woman holding a massive bowl of buttercream.
Fig. 5. A screenshot of the results of a query in the Instagram app for the hashtag #smbc. Results include nine preview square images of various cakes, upclose frosting shots, and a woman holding a massive bowl of buttercream.

 

On Instagram, where hashtags once helped drive more traffic to your post, bakers would use the tag #smbc to share a recipe for Swiss Meringue Buttercream Frosting. With far more characters to work with but even shorter user attention spans, Instagram recipes take on many abbreviated forms using bullet points, articleless phrases, and the ample use of symbolic emoji.

A screenshot of an Instagram post by @natashas_baking featuring a recipe for Funfetti sourdough. An image of a jar of sprinkled, rising dough is on the left and a caption with the emoji-sprinkled recipe is on the right.
Fig. 6. A screenshot of an Instagram post by @natashas_baking.

 

A screenshot of an Instagram post by @philkhoury featuring a recipe for SMBC. The recipe is listed in detail in the caption and as an ingredient list in the image.
Fig. 7. A screenshot of an Instagram post by @philkhoury.

 

Even with more technology than ever before, the way we share recipes still tends to rely on a shared culinary vernacular. And while McCulloch argues that “writing systems are greatly affected by the tools available to make them,”[iv] our collective understanding of “tsp” (or “TL” for German speakers) remains. However we abbreviate or piece together our instructions, recipe writers both professional and personal recognize one another by our shared understanding and appreciation of the small—but important—details of recipe writing.

 

[i] Amy Tigner and Allison Carruth, Literature and Food Studies (London: Routledge, 2017), 3.

[ii] Helen Zoe Veit, “The Making of the Modern American Recipe,” Smithsonian Magazine, 19 September 2017.

[iii] Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (New York: Penguin, 2019), 11.

[iv] McCulloch, Because Internet, 13.

KC Hysmith, PhD, is a food scholar and writer who focuses on the intersections of food history, gender, and digital media. She is the co-author and co-editor of several books on food culture including When Southern Women Cook (America’s Test Kitchen) and An American Girl Anthology. She holds a PhD in food studies from the University of North Carolina and an MLA in Gastronomy. See more of her work at kchysmith.com.

American Studies, Family and Household, Modern, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026, Women and Gender

The Poet’s Table: Recipes of the Sandburg Family

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By Madi Duran

When it comes to the eating habits of poet Carl Sandburg’s family, we know that they generally enjoyed hearty meals made from simple, homegrown ingredients. Fresh baked bread, hearty stews, and plenty of products made from Mrs. Lilian Sandburg’s prized Chikaming Dairy goats’ milk were the norm for the family at Connemara, their home in Flat Rock, North Carolina. We have few recipes written by the family in the collection, with most of our knowledge about their eating habits coming from oral histories with the daughters and grandchildren after Carl Sandburg’s death in 1967. However, scanned copies of recipe cards provided by his daughter, Helga Sandburg Crile, and granddaughter, Paula Steichen Polega, for the reference files at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site show how Mrs. Lilian Sandburg integrated recipes learned from her Luxembourgian parents and ones honoring her husband Carl’s Swedish heritage into their lives. There are also instructions written by Mrs. Sandburg herself for making goat cheeses in various styles, like a simple cooked cheese and a nut Neufchâtel, and her well-used copy of The Settlement Cookbook (1901).

Fig. 1. Recipes for Oma’s grape wine and a dandelion wine, copied for the Park reference files by Helga Sandburg Crile in May 1991.

A recipe for dandelion wine points back to Mrs. Sandburg’s European immigrant parents, the Steichens. Dandelions were brought by European colonists in the 1600s, both as a source of edible greens and as a means to make a cheaper alternative to grape wine.[i] A grape wine recipe, passed down by “Oma,” the German word for grandmother and used by the Steichens to refer to Mrs. Sandburg’s mother, is accompanied by a note urging the recipient to “keep this in verry [sic] save [sic] place as it is verry [sic] good resepie [sic].” Another recipe for cold borscht is specifically labeled as coming from the Steichens, and a pound cake is also accompanied by “Oma” in parentheses.

Fig. 2. A collection of Swedish Christmas cookies copied at an unknown time, likely by Helga Sandburg Crile.
Fig. 3. A recipe for Mrs. Sandburg’s favorite German pfeffernüsse cookies, typed for the Park by her granddaughter Paula Steichen Polega in 1979.

When it comes to holiday fare, a variety of Swedish cookie recipes have been saved, an homage to Carl Sandburg’s Swedish heritage: Swedish butter cookies, spritsar, and one recipe card simply labeled “Swedish Christmas Cookies” that call for warming spices and molasses, like a gingerbread but without any ginger. However, Mrs. Sandburg’s heritage is evident in a much-beloved recipe for pfeffernüsse that her granddaughter, Paula Steichen Polega, passed on to the park with the remark that it was “Mrs. Sandburg’s favorite.” It seems only fitting that the family made efforts to reconnect with their heritage during the holidays, a time for celebration, togetherness, and remembrance.

Fig. 4. A recipe for “Connemara Custard” copied for the Park reference files by Helga Sandburg Crile in May 1991.

The recipes documenting various uses for goat milk reflect Mrs. Sandburg’s dedication to bettering the dairy goat industry, including her own award-winning Chikaming Dairy herd, and desire to make goat milk a mainstream alternative for traditional dairy products. Even in basic recipes one can find evidence of her family’s flavor profile — anise and nutmeg appear in almost every cookie recipe, and anise makes an appearance in the recipe for cooked cheese written by Mrs. Sandburg. A custard recipe is modified into “Connemara Custard” by substituting goat milk for condensed milk. The recipe for a nut Neufchâtel, a cheese believed to date back to sixth-century Normandy,[ii] is also reimagined as a goat dairy product by Mrs. Sandburg from their days in Harbert, Michigan.

Fig. 5. A recipe for Nut Neufchatel goat cheese created by Mrs. Sandburg pre-1945 and distributed as part of her dairy goat operation, Chikaming Goat Farm, copied for the Park reference files by Helga Sandburg Crile in May 1991.

While we do not have many written recipes for the Sandburg family, what we do have illustrates how Mrs. Sandburg blended hers and her husband’s cultural backgrounds into memorable foods for her family and her ability to adapt recipes for her own health and benefit with goat dairy products. Some additional recipes used by the family can be found on a park webpage that references Lizzie Black Kander’s The Settlement Cookbook,[iii] a staple in the Sandburg home that can be seen in the kitchen in the historic house museum. Originally created for immigrants in Milwaukee, Kander’s work combined traditional Eastern European and American recipes.[iv] The use of this book also points to both the Sandburg and Steichen families’ lived experiences as European immigrants settling in the American Midwest — though they were in Illinois and Michigan, respectively, rather than Wisconsin. The use of The Settlement Cookbook, further exemplifies the efforts Mrs. Sandburg made to honor her and her husband’s European heritage and their lived experiences as first-generation Americans.

Figs. 6 and 7. Photographs of the Sandburgs’ copy of The Settlement Cookbook on display in their kitchen at Connemara.

At the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site, we have a varied collection that shows a life well-lived. As the final home of an illustrious author, Connemara includes thousands of books on display and a large archival collection in our repository, but also, uniquely, the evidence of the Sandburgs’ mundane daily life, which sets it apart from other collections. Half-smoked cigars, tens of thousands of annotated bookmarks, and unfinished knitting projects are just some of the artifacts left behind by the Sandburg family. Recipes, too, tell a part of their story. Though the original recipe cards remain in the hands of descendants, the scanned copies in our reference files and the copy of The Settlement Cookbook reveal staples of the family’s diet as well as foods chosen for special occasions like Christmas, showcasing their values and heritage through their diet.

[i] Kate Dingwall, “Summery, Sweet and Refreshing: Get to Know Dandelion Wine,” Wine Enthusiast, May 17, 2024.

[ii] Ma. Luisa De Guzman, “Neufchatel Cheese,” What Cheese, March 5, 2024.

[iii] Leah Koenig, “As American as Pot Roast and Potato Salad,” Tablet Magazine, April 20, 2016.

[iv] Leah Koenig, “As American as Pot Roast and Potato Salad,” Tablet Magazine, April 20, 2016.

Madi Duran is a Museum Technician at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina. She has had a love of museums ever since she was a child and has been volunteering and working at museums since she was in high school. In 2020 she graduated from St Olaf College with a degree in Art History, and went on to complete her master’s in Museum Studies through the University of Oklahoma’s online program in 2024. She started as an intern at the Carl Sandburg Home NHS in 2021 and began working as a National Park Service employee in 2024. She loves sharing information about the collection and Sandburg family with the public through the park’s official social media pages, speaking to visitors, assisting researchers, and sharing information through publications like this one!

American Studies, Modern, Posts, Printed Books, Spring 2026, Women and Gender

Recipe for an Unfinished Book: Helen Witty’s America Preserved

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By Melina Moe

From the Helen Witty Papers, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Yield: One comprehensive book on sweet preserving, “complete enough to be the last word for the next 50 years (or until nuclear winter, whichever comes first).”   

Prep time: At least twelve years (1974–1986), possibly longer.

Status: Unsealed.

Ingredients

  • 1 typed proposal to Sally Kovalchick at Workman Publishing, dated September 30, 1986
  • 1 working list of raw ingredients, “far from complete,” with more than 200 entries
  • 1 food safety testing sheet, annotated in red and black ink
  • Clippings, in quantity, from newspapers and magazines
  • Recipes borrowed, adapted, and attributed from sources spanning centuries
  • Handwritten marginalia, to taste

Method

Among the working papers of food writer Helen Witty (1921–2023), now held at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, sits a project that never became a book. Witty was a two-time James Beard Award winner, editor at Cuisine and Food & Wine, and author of Better Than Store-Bought (1979) and Fancy Pantry (1986). Her archive documents a career that ranged from editor and recipe developer to authority on American home cooking at a time when the food-writing world was still a small and largely male professional scene.[i] She called one of those unfinished projects America Preserved, and in a 1986 proposal to her publisher described it as “the book on sweet preserving in America.”[ii]

Fig. 1. The food safety testing sheet or the AMERPRE planning page. Image courtesy of author.

It was, in other words, an ambitious book. But perhaps one appropriately scaled to its subject, since preserving is as broad and deep a cooking technique as one could imagine. Evidence of deliberate food drying in the Middle East stretches back to roughly 12,000 B.C.E. The ancient Greeks packed quince in honey; the Romans cooked the two together to produce the ancestor of marmalade.[iii] For most of human history, salting, smoking, fermenting, and sugaring were not cooking techniques so much as serious strategies for addressing the challenge of food logistics– that is, how not to starve between harvests, through long voyages, or on military campaigns. In much of the world, preserving remains an economic necessity. But in the U.S., and likely for Witty’s audience, preserving had undergone a gradual shift toward the enthusiastic hobbyist or serious foodie looking to capture the flavor notes of a season for the less verdant times of year. As the National Center for Home Food Preservation puts it, we have moved “from ‘preserve because we have to’ to ‘preserve because we like to.’”   

Fig. 2. “New Mexico. Mrs. Fidel Romero Proudly Exhibits Her Canned Food” (1946), NARA via Wikimedia Commons.

Preserving has attracted an idiosyncratic cast of historical devotees. Nostradamus, before he was a prophet, was an apothecary who published his Treatise on Cosmetics and Jams in 1555. It was a bestseller featuring cherry jelly “fit to set before a King,” alongside love potions and plague remedies. In the summer of 1898, Marie Curie put up fourteen pots of gooseberry jelly and discovered polonium.[iv]

Witty’s America Preserved intended to carry on this lineage of serious, obsessive preservers. In the archive, we can find her proposed table of contents, which runs several pages: jams, jellies, conserves, fruit butters, marmalades, syrups, fruit pastes, curds, nectars, leathers, spoon sweets, fruits preserved in alcohol, and candied peels. A hand-written annotation suggests she was considering whether sweet-pickled fruits counted as preserves or relishes. Her working list of raw ingredients ran to more than 200 entries. She wanted to cover not just recipes but the science of pectin, the question of sugar substitutes, the uses of a pressure cooker, and the history behind it all: “lore, history, old art, old recipes,” updated for modern cooks in what she called “post-nostalgia” versions.

Fig. 3. “Canning by the cold pack method.” Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Like all archives worth their shelf space, though, what her papers illustrate most vividly is how Witty worked. The neatly-labeled folders (“S” for “spoon sweets”) are stuffed with clippings from newspapers and magazines, recipes gathered from other cooks, notes from conversations with food scientists at Cornell and extension agents on Long Island. A food safety testing sheet lists recipes she sent to the Suffolk County Cooperative Extension test kitchen and is annotated “okay” in red ink or flagged for further checking. Those recipes she sent for the students to verify include baked cranberry preserves with orange and cardamom, Bing cherries in a sweet nine-day pickle, Escoffier’s condiment of sweet peppers. Witty’s “personal” recipe collection was archival. She was a collector who tested, tasted, selected, innovated, annotated, and eventually shared her recipes in cookbooks. This is appropriate for a book that winkingly aspired to be “complete enough to be the last word for the next 50 years (or until nuclear winter, whichever comes first),” since the long history has always contained such borrowing and inheritance, with recipes across fences and through generations, each cook adjusting the sugar, swapping the spice, making it theirs. Witty’s book didn’t come to fruition, though it is preserved in her archive, which, like a garden in September, shows she may have had too many good things on her hands at once.

 

[i] Helen S. Witty Papers, MS#2106, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University. The guide to the boxes was compiled by Anne E. Witty, September 2022.

[ii] Helen Witty to Sally Kovalchick, September 30, 1986, Helen S. Witty Papers, MS#2106, Box 7.

[iii] For a lively overview, see Sue Shephard, Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

[iv] Susan Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). See also Rebecca Rupp, “Jam: Chemistry and Cool in a Jar,” National Geographic, 2021.

Melina Moe is the Curator of Literature at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where the Helen S. Witty papers are held.

American Studies, Family and Household, Food and Drink, Knowledge Transmission, Modern, Posts, Recipes and Recipe Books, Spring 2026, Teaching Resources, Women and Gender

Teaching Grandma Peg’s Recipes

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By Jennifer Cognard-Black

We begin with recipes. On day one of my “Books that Cook” class—an upper-level seminar on the literatures of food in which we study novels, memoirs, and films with recipes—I pass out pens and index cards and ask my students to jot down a recipe they know by heart. To assure those who don’t identify as cooks, I tell them that if they know how to make, say, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich or a cheese quesadilla, that counts as a recipe.

Students then swap their cards and examine their peer’s recipe. We start by thinking like rhetoricians, talking about the rhetorical form of modern recipes, meaning their components (title, ingredients, and instructions) and why they’re structured in this way, linking form to function.

From there, I talk about the history of this genre in North America—from oral traditions to commonplace books to cookbooks and the rise of nutritionism and level measurement—before suggesting something that I’ve written about in Melissa Goldthwaite’s anthology Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics: that recipes are embodied stories.

Considering recipes as stories leads us to think like anthropologists, examining our recipes as artifacts of culinary cultures—ones that reveal familial, ethnic, religious, economic, and agricultural traditions and values. We also discuss how recipes produce bodies: the writer’s, of course, but also ancestral and future bodies and even the reader’s body should they make the dish. As Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster argue so well in The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, “The recipe. . .[puts] the reader in contact with the writer, making personal connections with a cultural moment or a community, and allowing the reader to interpolate [themselves] into the text, making the narrative [their] own.”

Importantly, though, we also discuss how recipes can exclude as well as include, coding certain bodies as other and/or usurping aspects of someone else’s culinary culture without giving them credit. In the U.S., that might mean erasing the origins of recipes, as has happened repeatedly to Black women who, as Toni Tipton-Martin explains in her book The Jemima Code, “did much of the cooking in early American kitchens.” Similar erasures and exclusions have occurred with recipes first developed by Indigenous, Latin American, and Asian communities.     

In every food-based class I teach, I encourage learning that’s sensory, creative, and collaborative. And so I do the assignments alongside my students, including this exercise. For the recipe I know by heart, I use my paternal grandmother’s for banana bread—one she snail-mailed to me when I was a graduate student, suggesting I could save money by repurposing blackened bananas into a “Delicious Treat!”

Many of my best-beloved recipes come from this grandmother, Nellie “Peg” Cognard. When Peg died in 2004 at the age of 89, my father asked if I wanted anything of hers. Immediately I said, “her recipe box”—which is actually a 1970s index-card organizer, 14 inches long and missing a lid. This unassuming container holds around 1400 recipe cards, spattered with grease and mostly written in my grandmother’s hand: an archive of her cooking culture, particularly among her fellow homemakers in Omaha, Nebraska. These recipe cards range from the 1940s through the mid-80s, when my Grandma and Grandpa Cognard moved to Texas, far from brisk Nebraska winters.

Grandma Peg’s 1400 recipes are for mid-century midwestern delicacies such as Ham Loaf, Hamburger Pie, Butterhorn Rolls, Waldorf Astoria Salad, Dump Cake, Milky Way Cake, and my father’s favorite, Toll House Cookies with Oatmeal.

Fig. 1. Toll House Cookies. Image Credit: Personal Collection.
Fig. 2. Toll House Cookies. Image Credit: Personal Collection.

On the second day of “Books that Cook,” I bring in loaves of Grandma Peg’s banana bread along with the entire “Desserts” section of her recipe box. As I hand out fistfuls of cards, I tell them that, today, we’re going to think like historians.

The first thing students notice is the handwriting, a slanting cursive with looping O’s and tight S’s. They enjoy the tactility: the bodily trace of Grandma Peg as their thumbs brush over her words—which is part of what turns such functional texts into heirlooms.

Then they notice the names. While my grandmother made all these dishes herself, she gave other cooks their due, writing their name in the corner. Most recipes came to my grandma by way of friends in her United Methodist women’s group—including her closest friend Gen May—or from family members, such as her daughter Shirley or my mother Anne. This practice of attribution underscores the collaborative nature of my grandma’s cooking circle, while also building an archive of communal knowledge.

Fig. 3. Recipe Attributions. Image Credit: Personal Collection.

Students are also struck by the distinct modalities of the cards, which reveal how twentieth-century American cooking was influenced by the rise of consumer culture—in everything from the abundance and branding of processed foods (e.g., Angel-flake coconut) to the personalized recipe cards. They also note profound shifts in communication technologies, with some recipes plunked out on a typewriter and others cut-and-pasted from newspapers or magazines.

Fig. 4. Recipe Card Modalities. Image Credit: Personal Collection

What becomes clear through our historical analysis is that these stay-at-home women forged a kind of amateur professionalism as home cooks. Their recipe exchanges gave them agency, community, and sometimes celebrity; a woman could build a reputation on her perfect ice-box cakes.

As our conclusion to this work—and to set up future class discussions—I then bring out some of Grandma Peg’s recipe cards from beyond the “Desserts” section, including ones for Oriental Tuna Salad, Old Virginia Peanut Soup, Taiwanese Special, Dead Bread (“Pan de Muerto”), and Poor Man’s Liver Paté. Why? Because my grandmother’s recipes are products of the politics, economy, and social hierarchies of her day, and ephemera such as handwritten recipes record it all: not just how food can create belonging, but how culinary cultures can appropriate and exclude as well. As Abby M. Dubisar puts it in her article on “Jell-O Constructions of White Femininity,” through cookbooks—but also through caches of handwritten recipes—“white stories about race and class and food…are maintained.”

Fig. 5. Dead Bread. Image Credit: Personal Collection
Fig. 6. Dead Bread. Image Credit: Personal Collection

Beginning my “Books that Cook” classes with this personal recipe collection accomplishes a number of pedagogical goals. It asks students to think critically through distinct disciplinary lenses. It also asks them to think with their bodies as they touch and taste history, handling these cards and eating a slice of Grandma Peg’s banana bread. And, finally, it asks that they consider the complexity of cooking communities in light of identity and inequality.

At the end of our first week, I ask everyone to take their peer’s recipe home and turn it into the page of a cookbook using old-school tools: pens and markers, tape and glue. By week two, these pages become a class cookbook zine. I scan their pages and add a cover, epigraph, and table of contents before making hard copies for everyone—which accomplishes yet another pedagogical goal (and perhaps the one that’s most important to me): starting our own culinary community.

Jennifer Cognard-Black is Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a public honors college fastened to a shore in Southern Maryland. A Fulbright Scholar to Slovenia and the Netherlands, she received the 2020 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, considered the “Nobel Prize” for teachers. Jennifer is the author or co-editor of six books, including Books that Cook: The Making of a Literary Meal (NYUP 2014) and Good Eats: 32 Writers on Eating Ethically (NYUP 2024), both with her long-time collaborator Melissa A. Goldthwaite. Jennifer also publishes essays and short fiction, and she’s produced various lecture series for The Great Courses and Audible, including an Audible Original titled “Books that Cook: Food & Fiction” (2021).